How many of us as parents make our children do homework, send them to tuitions, and blame them for not understanding their lessons. Why do we have to treat learning which is a natural thing for the human mind into such a chore? Coming to think of that, when did we last learn something for the sake of learning? After we get into our jobs, we only think about money and job position. I once met a maths teacher who teaches math for primary classes. I was telling her about the website
khanacademy.org and how it helps understand math concepts in a simpler way. And the reaction I got from her was ‘chal forget it, it’s boring, I keep doing this day in and day out’. I was surprised by that comment from a teacher. And it made me wonder, if teachers teach because they want the kids to learn or just listen to what they have to say?
I was never thinking about teaching until recently. But I come to understand that to teach, you first have to be open to learn. How can u inspire a child to learn when you yourself are not open to the concept? When I’m talking about learning, it’s not just about the subject that you teach but also try to learn how the child understands what u teach. And I’m not talking just about a school environment; it can even be the day to day teaching that you do as a parent for your child. Even when we discipline the kid, we only want the kid to listen to us but don’t really bother about why he should learn a certain behavior or why something is bad.
I know I can just go on about this, but the other day I was playing Mega Bloks with my boy, he made something out of 3 blocks and proudly announced ‘Amma, look four’. I was really looking in awe as to how he was able to perceive a number by fixing a few blocks. So after that we both tried to make a few alphabets and numbers through the blocks.
PAL completed two years recently and one of the gifts he got was the alphabet and number puzzle made out of foam board. So I was removing the alphabets and making him fix it into the right board. After sometime he was playing by himself while I moved on to do some other work. He comes out from his room and shows me alphabet ‘V’ upside down and told me ‘Amma, pant’. I was almost on tears. I then learnt that there are absolutely no rules or boundaries to learn, the difference it takes is just in our minds.
It's so beautiful how kids learn in the most unconventional way, through play, through music, through conversation, by asking questions and it just gives us more responsibility to give them a more conducive environment for them to learn than confine to the conventional parenthood which comes with the mindset that 'i'm now a parent and hence i don't have to learn anything, its only my child's duty to learn.' When we as parents inspire our kids to learn, why would our kids treat learning a chore?
PAL and myself made this Car Park for all this cars, he takes reverse of the cars he wants outside by humming reverse tunes similar to his dad's car :-)
